Tuesday, March 04, 2014

Once upon a time people used something called paper
for writing all sorts of things, from love letters to secret sauce
formulas to stockholder reports. It was when writing was just
word-winding.

They say some hyper competitive Silicon Valley companies (there was
no other known kind) even went as far as hiring detectives to sort
through paper trash of their competitors to patch together highly
guarded business secrets.

This paper was made of trees that grew wild in the nature-in places
people of old used to call forests. There were all sorts of round
trees and all kinds of flat paper.
Something called deforestation saw to the end of these green forests and paper became rare and eventually extinct.

People didn’t stop writing, they wrote even more. But instead of
real paper, they started to use old software programs that
nostalgically looked like pages of white paper on computer screens, but
they were really nothing more than zeroes and ones, stored on
primitive hard drives.

As everyone knows those clunky computers eventually became obsolete
too when we started to use glasses and tablets and watches and other
things to record our blinkings and doings and thinkings.

Now and then one of those ancient paper archives called Libraries
that have miraculously survived shredders and recyclers are discovered
here and there. Page-turning paper-lovers from all over the world
immediately converge on the discovery pits to make sure these antiquated
archives don’t turn into dust during excavations...

...

...In 2006 Dr. Matthew Stolper, one of
handful of specialists on Elamite language in the world, cleared his
plate, assembled a stellar team of scholars from a number of American
and European universities, embarked on the never-ending quest for
(much) needed grants, and took on the emergency task of digitization of
the Achaemenid archive-known as the Persepolis Fortification Archive
Project (PFAP).

And here we are.

Under Matt Stolper’s steadfast watch and with the moral support of
his faithful friend, Baxter the Beast, the initial phase of cleaning,
conserving and digitizing the archive is finally reaching critical mass
and the next phase of making sense of the mass of generated data is
kicking in-the old sprinkling of the water of life on dead bones.

In the process, surprising new discoveries have come to light, among them finding the footprint of Udusana (Greek: Atossa),
the quintessential Achaemenid royal woman (queen), who, according to
the classical writers, was the eldest daughter of Cyrus the Great, the
chief wife of Darius the Great, and the powerful mother of Xerxes
(Persian: Xsayarsa, or Khshayarsha). Triple Crown of Persian royalty.

These Persian administrative records, roughly 30,000 or so pieces
from a single archive, dating from 509 to 493 BCE (from 13th to 28th
regnal years of Darius the Great, about 16 years, with some references
to the 7th regnal year)-conceptually likened to the bones of a
dinosaur-have led to not just an understanding of the routine imperial
administrative infrastructure, but all sorts of interesting things like
art, language, religion, and society of the Persian Achaemenid Empire,
that was unknowable merely from the traditional biblical and classical
sources.

The sort of raw data that the large cuneiform archives like the
Persepolis Fortification Archive have been yielding is “Big
Data”-datasets that are getting too big to process using classical
computing techniques. Big Data is now being used in computer technology
circles to refer to the latest advances in aggregating massive amounts
of data from various sources and enabling researchers to mine and map
data in amazing new ways-see what no one has seen before, ask questions
no one has answered yet.

On the academic side of the coin, Big Data research will eventually
exponentially expand the newly-minted field of Digital Humanities.

While virtualization and visualization of archival data from the
Achaemenid royal chancelleries will not give us historical answers-at
least not to what we think-it will, however, provide a richer context
for understanding and interpreting the Big Data we have accidentally inherited and luckily recovered.

This Big Data is also the playground of writers like me who troll
the archival treasure troves for historical backstory to turn boring
administrative records into sizzling stories about the adventurous
lives and scandalous love affairs of the Persian royal sons and
daughters-kings and their queens who once ruled the world-the real royal
games of the only throne that really mattered. Masters of Asia.

Achaemenid scholars have been spending years carefully
reconstructing a clay dinosaur to restore Persians to the history of
the world, and the Persian storytellers thankfully ride this
paper-beast to restore the Persians to the story of the world. Dr. Stolper, now retired as of the end of 2013, is continuing as
the head of the PFA Project, crisscrossing the globe on a mission to
evangelize the immense impact of the ancient archive on Persian
Achaemenid history and heritage.

In recognition of his lifelong achievements and his tireless
efforts in preserving and promoting the integration of knowledge from
the Achaemenid Administrative Archives into mainstream classical and
ancient Near Eastern (ANE) studies, there would be a celebration at the
Oriental Institute tentatively scheduled for 28 April 2014.

These types of events are normally planned for the local
colleagues, students and patrons of the institute. This one, however,
might just turn out to be a greater gathering of the friends of the
Persepolis Fortification Archive Project, die-hard supporters of
Persian history and heritage, and the who-is-who of the Persian
Achaemenid studies.

Tell Parnakka (probably the paternal uncle of Darius the Great and
the first chief of the imperial administrative archives at Parsa) to
order more Shiraz wine for the feast. Persians are coming.